Category Archives: Tech Bits and Background

What Does a Truchai Do

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It carries a warrior into battle. Warriors in Tuathal’s world do not fight from the truchai, although some very, very good archers might shoot from them.

If you have read the stories of the Tain (Cuchulainn and friends) or of Fionn and the Finna, and others, you read about the Irish warriors and their chariots. They are drawn by two horses, attached to a horizontal pole (as was customary for medieval wagons and carts), with a wooden frame and wicker floor and sides. Archaeologists have found Continental carts from just before the same period in Ireland, and Classicists have Caesar and other’s accounts of Celts fighting from chariots.

But what exactly did they look like, and how did they work?

A very recent recreation of an Iron Age (pre Irish Saga) Celtic war chariot. Image used under Fair Use for Education, Copyright by Boris Dreyer. Image from Boris Dreyer, “Cross-country Celtic Chariots,” Ancient Warfare Magazine No. 105, p. 57.

Dr. Dreyer and his team of students looked at the archaeological finds, Caesar, Irish tradition, and developed what you see above. The entire article is fascinating and is a magnificent example of how important experimental archaeology is for answering questions about “But how did it work?” How do you harness two horses to pull when you don’t have horse collars? A shoulder yoke and two bands of leather per horse, one on the chest with a strap between the front legs connecting it to a strap just aft of the shoulders (like a very forward saddle girth). The pole from the yoke to the chariot has a great deal of play. Ropes, pegs, and leather strips hold the chariot together, and each wheel is entirely bent from one piece of wood. the spokes are then added, along with the oak hub and iron outer band.

So … how could Irish warriors balance on that pole? The stories all say they did. Two things might be at play. One, translation problems from Old Irish to Middle Irish to Early Modern Irish (sometimes thence to Latin) when the monks copied down the tales, and later translators went from Latin or Irish to English. The Gaelic word might have a slightly different technical meaning from what the monks, writing several hundred years later, understood it to mean, so they used the what they knew, which was a flat pole and horse collars. Two, the Irish stories might have been updated to reflect the arrival of new technology like horse collars, retconning as it were “proper” horse gear into the older tales. Likewise the use of wicker instead of leather. Although that might have been a regional difference and preference, since it served the same purpose and was light, flexible, and easy to repair.

After studying the article, and looking at other things about the Celtic war chariots, I’ve decided to keep what I have in the novel. It is one less thing to have to explain to readers, one less technical detail to keep in mind when I write.

Blogger Note: I highly recommend Ancient Warfare Magazine and others from Karawansarai Press. No, they are not inexpensive, but you get what you pay for, and I keep going back to them for details political, technical, and artistic.

What Was the Statue Wearing?

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No, this isn’t the set up for a joke. I was looking at images of a deity figure found in Scotland, one that had been deconsecrated (so to speak) and interred face-down in a peat bog near where it had originally stood, 3500 years ago. When found in the 1800s, it wore a skirt, possibly a shawl as well, but certainly a skirt. Alas, the Victorians didn’t have the preservation techniques we have today, so that was lost, and the figure dried and warped. Fortunately, the finders had a scientific artist with them, who documented what the statue had looked like when it was lifted from the bog, and the archaeologists described the fabric, which could not be preserved.

In the western art tradition, most statues are not dressed in additional fabric. Some religious images are, especially figures of the Virgin Mary and infant Jesus, but if you think about the main western art style going back to Classical figures, the person or deity depicted is fully dressed, or sufficiently dressed for what is being shown. Even nudes were not enhanced with cloth draperies, nor were later figures of saints, kings, and others. At least in one case, in what is now Scotland, that wasn’t true. A carefully carved female figure also had made for her and placed on her, a skirt and/or possibly a plaid that draped around the figure. Since the statue was about 1.6m (5′ 7″ or so), this was an investment of labor to make the cloth for the statue.

As it turns out, donating garments to images of deities is not unusual, globally speaking. In Mesopotamia, Egypt, places in Asia, and elsewhere, clothes and accessories were made and donated to the images of the gods, so that they would be properly honored and dressed. Ancestors also received garments, sometimes through ritual burning on a certain day, sometimes as replicas of garments. Westerners, following the Greek and Roman practices, created images wearing clothes, so outfits did not need to be made. And Christian and Jewish beliefs about the presence of the holy discouraged dressing images as a daily practice. A few statues of the Virgin and Jesus are the rare exceptions, and are known as exceptions.

SO, what does the image from the bog, now in the Scottish History Museum in Edinburgh, tell us about ancient Scottish beliefs? That the bog, which overlooked a road and waterway, needed a deity, perhaps one to protect travelers in the dangerous terrain. We know from offerings in other places that marshes and fords could be edge-lands, where the divine was close, or power of other kinds present, so offerings of various kinds were appropriate. The statue was a woman, with a niche just above her feet, perhaps for offerings. Pale quartz pebbles formed the center of her eyes, staring out of dark wood. She would have been a striking, perhaps haunting, representation of a greater power, clearly embodying something that needed to be honored, or propitiated. Beyond that?

Thus hangs world building in a prehistoric-of-sorts fictional Celtic world.

Tracing Ideas and Culture Before Books

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How do you determine if people with ideas moved around, or if just the ideas got passed from place to place? Back in the day, we couldn’t. It was generally assumed that, before writing, people took their culture with them, so when archaeologists observed a change in pottery as well as burial practices in a region, obviously a new group had arrived, probably beat up the locals and took over. After all, that’s what the Romans had done, and the Saxons, and Normans, and Europeans in North and South America, and Zulu in southern Africa, and …

An Urn from the Urnfeld Culture. Source: https://www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2025/05/30-vessels-from-the-urnfield-culture-discovered-beneath-a-road-in-germany/

The Urnfeld Culture people often buried cremated remains in pots, without grave goods. They were a Bronze Age people, or culture, that extended from the steppes in the east almost to Iberia and Britain.

Note where the culture isn’t. Source: https://www.worldhistory.org/image/14456/map-of-the-urnfield-culture-c-1300-bce/

At some point, varying from region to region, a new type of pottery began to appear, along with grave goods and iron. The culture that developed was and is called Celtic, and spread from Iberia to the British Isles into the Balkans, or vice versa. One hallmark of early Celtic peoples was the use of the iron swords and certain types of pottery and pins (fibulae).

Not exactly what happened, as it turns out. Source: https://irishmyths.com/2022/11/17/celtic-origins/

It turns out that the language associated with Celtic culture may (and probably did) have originated in Iberia, then spread along the Atlantic and into Brittany and the British areas. However, that’s not where the culture seems to have come from, perhaps. Artifacts alone say Halstatt and La Tene (Austria and France/Switzerland) were the starting points. Language and genetics suggest that it was much more diffuse, and complicated, and ideas passed back and forth, with Halstatt patterns being traded west, then modified into the animal-rich designs associated with the Irish and Welsh Celtic cultures, and traded back to the east.

But what about the ferocious Celts who invaded everywhere, and who gave the Romans the heebee-geebees? Well, Celtic ideas and language spread, and people with them, sometimes by attacking and defeating local populations, sometimes a few at a time as traders and general wanderers (there’s always at least one in every family …), or by marriage. Genetic studies suggest that in some places, the cultural traits and goods traveled far more than people did. The Amesbury Archer found in England, came from farther east about 3,000 years ago. His descendants still live in the area. The tradition of an overwhelming invasion of Celts might not apply. Ireland could be different, and seems to be, even without the traditions from the Book of Invasions.

Pottery and other durable goods are very important for identifying cultures and peoples. Styles of decoration, and types of pottery, tell us about changes over time. Ideas are some of what changes, although those can be harder to trace. Language studies, done with due awareness of the problems of “excavating” ancient speech, help as well.

We can be pretty certain that waves of migration, and objects, moved west and east (Irish invading Scotland and creating Dalriada; Celts fleeing to Armorica and developing the Breton language and culture) around Europe. Ideas probably also passed, or styles did, as people saw something imported and thought, “Hmmm, I wonder if I could add that to my next pot,” or “That’s a useful gizmo, how can I duplicate it here,” or “That powerful man has several daughters. My son needs a wife. Let’s see what can be arranged.” It’s a bit more complicated than the original waves-of-invasions ideas, but that’s what happens when there are humans involved.

Two Countries, Divided by a Common Language

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If someone says, “That’s in my wheel house,” an archaeologist studying prehistoric Scotland will have a very different mental picture than a will an American.

What the archaeologist thinks of: http://www.worldtour-of-scotland.com/tour/2aug-shetland-contd.shtml

The wheel-shaped house was semi-subterranian, and found mostly in the north of what is now Scotland. They were cozy, weather resistant, and practical for the place.

In a wheelhouse: https://ca.pinterest.com/pin/archaeology-hebrides-wheelhouse-the-wheelhouse-is-a-fascinating-type-of-iron-age-house-unique-so–24769866692987055/

A Yank would be rather puzzled about this. After all, when an American says that something is “In my wheel house,” we usually mean:

The Wheel house of the Yacht Camellia. Source: https://www.charterworld.com/index.html?sub=gallery&gallery=wheelhouse&page=3

I’ve been reading about the first type of wheelhouse, in the context of prehistory in Scotland and how people lived, farmed, and so on. The second type is one I’m more familiar with from reading naval and nautical history and a few books on seamanship. (DadRed always wondered if, had we lived on the coast, I’d have become a ship’s pilot or master instead of a flying pilot.)

Each specialty has its own language, and toss in two countries with dialects that have diverged over the past two hundred and more years, and confusion is guaranteed. Fish and Chips? Are knickers what old-school golfers wear, and boys in the 1920s, or are they unmentionables? Is the boot of a car the thing where you put luggage, or the pair of soles sticking up between the toolbox and the cab on a farmer or rancher’s pickup?

Matrilineal, Patriarchal, Matrilocal, and Messy

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Originally posted in 2022, but very applicable to Tuathal and Company.

So, how does succession, inheritance, and other stuff work out in a society? There are almost as many answers as there are societies, and some people like to imagine a time, way back when, that society was matrilineal, matriarchal, and so on. Anthropologists are still looking for that one. However, the British Isles had groups that were matrilineal and matrilocal, but patriarchal. Or at least, their leadership was.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the Picts, the Celtic* people of the eastern half of what is now Scotland, north of roughly the Edinburgh-Glasgow line. Roughly. Borders were fluid, especially after Rome abandoned Hadrian’s wall. The Picts had no writing (or so people thought), and until the creation of the Pictish King List in around AD 724 CE or so, we don’t have any records that are not written by outsiders. According to Bede of Jarrow, writing in the early 700s, and Gildas (mid 500s), the Picts and the Gaels of Dal Riata swept down across Hadrian’s Wall as soon as the Roman Army departed, looting, burning, and generally terrorizing the other Britons**. Gildas says that this was because the Britons had gotten immoral and a few had backslid into paganism. Bede says that missionaries, notably St. Ninian, had been at work up in the area in the 200s, but obviously “their dippin’ didn’t take” as my maternal grandmother would have said. The Irish annals talk about the Picts when they discuss Dal Riata and the other Hiberno-Scottish groups.

One of the questions that came up about the Picts was their system of government. There are few contrarians who argue that the Picts had a diffuse, family-based, semi-egalitarian matrilineal government that worked very well until the Christians, especially the Roman Christians after 640, introduced a much more centralized and unequal political system. Most historians that I’ve read argue for a series of lords, low kings, and a high king who was chosen for partly competence rather than strictly by inheritance. However, the king had to come from a certain family line, or from one of a small group of families—again, the sources are unclear. The system was matrilineal and matrilocal.

The Pictish king lists don’t show a son consistently succeeding his father until the later 800s. Before that, it was the son of the previous high king’s sister. And she might marry a Saxon, or Briton, or Gael. The outsider lived with his wife, and his sons and daughters were raised as Picts. This also led a few people to argue that the Picts had been matriarchal at some point in the distant past, until [Indo-Europeans/Christianity] ruined everything. Actually, that system was common in the British Isles, and you find it in the Welsh Mabinogi, the Irish Annals, and other places. The Picts emphasized the female line of descent because it made sense. In times of trouble, the odds of knowing who the mother was were very high. Knowing the father might be a bit more difficult. And women pass culture and religion to their children from a very young age.

However, the Picts, like the Britons and Gaels of the west, were patriarchal. At least by the time of the Roman observers and later, males governed. Only a very few women are named in the king lists, and those are women who are married to a king.

*The Gaels of Dal Riata spoke a dialect related to Irish. The Picts spoke a dialect related to Brythonic (original “English Celtic” so to speak), Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. All are Celtic, but the two are not really mutually intelligible.

**Whether the people of Dal Riata were 100% Irish, or were Irish nobles with a larger Briton or Pictish subservient population, or if they happened to have come over from Ireland at some point in the distant past and kept their dialect of Celtic, seems to be a topic of endless debate among historians and archaeologists.

https://meetthepicts.com/primary-sources/

Dun Add and Tuathal

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Tuathal, being a master bard (allav), doesn’t really have a fixed abode. His ancestry also plays a part because he was a diplomatic offspring, the son of a western prince and eastern queen, raised in his mother’s court as her tradition dictated. However, one place where he knows he will be welcome and find space, protection political as well as physical, and kinship is his half-brother’s court on the edge of the western sea. That court, and the fortress it is found in, is based on Dun Add, a prehistoric and Iron Age fortification and ritual site in what is now Argyll in southwestern Scotland.

At the base of Dun Add, on a sunny but not warm summer day. Author photo, June 2022.

At the time Tuathal knows the place, it is on the edge of an arm of the sea, where a loch, salt marsh, hills, and the land all meet and intertwine. This explains the ritual power of a rocky hill surrounded by salt marsh on one side, and good dry grazing land on the other, between two rows of hills.

Looking inland from the top of Dunadd. Source: https://sobt.co.uk/dunadd-fort/
Looking toward where the sea came in, two thousand and more years ago. Source: https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g551919-d285675-Reviews-Dunadd_Fort-Lochgilphead_Argyll_and_Bute_Scotland.html

To the east is Kilmartin Glen, one of the most megalith and rock art rich corners of Scotland. You can’t go a mile without seeing standing stones, the remains of a burial mound or stone circle, and other archaeological remnants. I meandered around some standing stones, not touching. One small cluster bugged me, a few were just cool. The area has been used for ritual and worship for as long as people have been present in the area, and a high place where sea and water meet … of course it would hold significance for the people around it. It is said that the kings of the Scotti of Dalriata were crowned on the crest of the hill, and a ring fort made use of the natural cleft in the stones for a protected access.

Tuathal knows the power of the place, as well as the political authority wielded by his half brother. The combination makes it a safe place to overwinter, composing, teaching, performing, and learning. That said, he also knows that there are others who are less than pleased with his presence, for several reasons. Diplomacy and tact are also wise in his half brother’s court. Tuathal has great respect but little fear of the long ago Old Ones and their works. The priests of the gods of land and waters, however take a different view of the long-gone powers and people who might consider consorting with them, especially people who are half eastern.

If you are reading the name quickly and thinking, “That’s almost familiar,” you read Tolkien. The Dunedain Rangers take their name from similar words associated with Edinburgh (Dun Eiden, Dunedain.)

Push-me Pull-you: Why People Moved

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When academics discuss migrations, relocations, and so on, they talk about push factors and pull factors. The assumption or implication is usually that there was a physical reason for a population to up stakes and move to greener (literally) pastures, or new land, or across a large body of water (lake) or over the mountains. The focus is on groups, because individuals and families were much, much harder to track before the modern tools of isotope analysis and DNA tracing became available. By looking at changes in styles of pottery, burial customs, metalwork, house shapes, public monuments (mounds to long mounds to standing stones to mounds once more), the physical markers of culture could be tracked. Later, the genetic markers could also be studied, and sometimes individuals traced back to a place of origin if their teeth had survived.

Why did people move, when it was people and not ideas or objects being exchanged/given/traded? People tend to be sedentary to an extent. Even nomadic herders have territories that they prefer, regions that have the water, grass, other plants, fuel, and materials they want and need. Farmers are more sedentary, although some groups have scattered garden patches they move to from a central village or fortified settlement. Often it seems to take a strong push or strong pull, or both, to get peoples to uproot from a familiar area and relocate to a place that is strange to them, but perhaps better. The grass may be greener, but it’s not the ancestral grass.

Herders moved to places with better forage and water. In the great sweep of human history in Eurasia, now that we can track climate changes and shorter-term, severe weather changes, we can see the push factors. As the central steppes grew wetter or drier, colder and warmer, the lack of grass or lushness of grass encouraged people to move in or move out. Not weather alone, of course, but that combined with other people’s movements often sent a wave of nomads west or east and south. The Hsung-nu on the move started the groups later called Goths, Visigoths, Franks, Burgundians and others shifting west. Long before them, people from around the Caspian and Black seas who spoke what would become Indo-European relocated south or west. The west-moving groups sought more pasture for their horses and cattle, as well as the blend of resources available on the edges of the steppes. At the same time, the settled farmer of the Danube Valley cultures, Trypolie, Cucuteni, and others, had trouble with cooler and wetter weather that made farming more difficult, but favored the nomads. A push and a pull, and the great farming settlements on the steppe edge disappeared from the record, and Indo-European burials and words began to appear in the Hungarian Plain, then flow west and north and south. A push and pull, a blending of cultures, and the languages we associate with Europe appear. The mounted culture as well.

Skip ahead to the late 900s and early to mid 1000s, and we see something similar, except with writing this time. As the climate in norther Europe grew milder after the downturn of the 500s-700s (the literally dark part of the Dark Ages), the economy of northern Europe began to thrive, trade increased, and the age of the cathedrals and High Middle Ages began. However, that same weather pattern that favored the north brought cold and wet, then cold and dry weather to the eastern Mediterranean, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. Likewise the steppes north of the Caspian Sea. As the people of Jerusalem and Bagdad struggled with cold, dry weather that dried up wells and springs and froze crops, the Turkic peoples had to leave the snowy, sparse pastures around the Caspian and relocate. They moved southwest, into Mesopotamia, and became the Seljuk Turks. The Byzantine Empire, having recoverd from the Plague of Justinian and subsequent waves or trouble, now faced a new group of antagonists just as the weather turned against them. The Magyars, now somewhat settled and converted to western Christianity, raided from the north because of the harsh winters in the Danube Basin, as the Seljuks pushed in from the south. Jerusalem never recovered the water supplies it had before AD 900, because the springs dried, the ground shifted, and the water could not return to old pathways.

In the New World, the Little Ice Age of the 1300s caused shifts among the people of North America as well. The Anasazi cultural world faded, the survivors moved east into the better watered areas, then east once more into the Rio Grande Valley. Others came down from the north, the Athapaskan speakers who would be later known as Apache, Navajo, and others. Meanwhile, the great Mississippian culture of mound builders and conquest, Cahokia, had deforested the area around their cities. When the weather pattern shift hit, they couldn’t cope. The civilization fell apart and the people scattered, leaving a regional vacuum filled by people from the west and north. The shift east and south rippled as well. Two hundred years later, toss in waves of disease that reduced native populations, and you have bison expanding to fill in where people had been, leading to buffalo in Virginia and Kentucky, the Shawnee as the last surviving descendants of the culture of Cahokia, and Europeans reporting how empty the landscape seemed of people.

Then you have individuals. The Hebrew scripture describes one man and his close family who upped stakes (literally) and migrated with their herds far from the ancestral lands because G-d told them to. In other cases, we find people who wandered far from home on their own, usually men but not always, and end up west of where they started. Celtic culture included stories of a land of eternal youth and happiness “to the west” over the waves perhaps. There’s always one or two individuals who explore, who meander elsewhere. Sometimes they became traders, or the guys who went out each year to get metal ore or flint or other things and bring them back to the tribe. Sometimes they just headed out for parts unknown and didn’t write back. Kipling’s “The Explorer” and his internal whisper of “something lost beyond the ranges/some thing lost and hiding—Go!” strike a chord because Anglo-Americans, the English and Irish, and others seem to have thrown a lot of that kind of people in the 1800s. Curiosity was the pull. Sometimes society was the push—the need to get away from trouble, angry neighbors, a bad experience, horrible family life … That’s harder to track in archaeology, but people don’t change all that much down through the centuries, and there are enough stories about “that one uncle who disappeared one day and came back twenty years later with stories and cool stuff” to make a pattern.

Pushes and pulls, wandering and returning, curiosity and trouble, all reasons why people moved. Today, Americans relocate far more often than Europeans and Brits, probably a legacy of that itch that brought our ancestors across the seas.

Humans Red in Tooth and Claw

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Prehistoric people got into fights, some of them rather large in size and scale. They also carried out what appear, for lack of a better term, to be honor killings. They could take very good care of members of the community, and at the same time be brutal to outsiders.

It always surprises me a little when people are terribly upset by this. People are people. The basic hardware and deep-running software have not changed all that much in the past fifteen thousand years or so. Certain Native American groups have gone to great lengths to stop archaeologists from doing research that might show that their ancestors were at times violent people who may (or may not) have eaten parts of other people. Anyone who looks at a place like Hovenweep, or parts of Mesa Verde, or the Hopi mesa-top towns, or reads early European accounts of meeting Native Americans would not be surprised to learn that the ancient pueblos were easily defendable, or that warfare and raiding might have taken place. Ditto in Europe, although cliff dwellings are less common in most of Europe due to geology.

I was thinking about a video I watched about a genetic bottleneck in the male line of a certain population, and what it might signify. It appears that a lot of men were killed off at roughly the same time, leading to evidence of a bottleneck in the male chromosome contribution. A slightly related pattern has been observed in Scotland and Ireland, where Scandinavian genetic traces suddenly became more common in the male lines, reducing the native male contribution to varying degrees.

Prehistoric people were not peaceful. Who knew? [eyeroll or similar gesture here]. I’m neither surprised nor upset by this information, because people are people. But for some cultures and the mental picture they have of the Ancestors, this kind of information is very upsetting, and has to be explained away, or suppressed. Those who came before can’t have been violent killers who ate the losers. Absolutely not. To admit otherwise is to threaten the faith and perhaps even the foundation of community cohesion. Note that some of these same believers argue that to accept a different faith is to cast oneself out of the community for ever. Only pagans may be tribal members, because Reasons. Among the Hopi, ritual and faith keeps the universe in balance, and those who upset the balance must be counseled, or if extreme enough, removed permanently from doing what they are doing to cause trouble.

My ancestors killed other people, beat them up, stole their livestock, and did what was needed to survive. So did yours. That’s why I’m here, why you are here. That this distresses some moderns … I don’t get it. At an academic level I can comprehend the reasons, but I don’t “get” it.

Bagpipe vs. Harp

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What musical instrument do we associate with Scotland? Wales? Ireland? Ireland is easy – the harp is on their currency. They also have the uillan pipes, the ones played seated and pumped with the elbow. Scotland is bagpipes, played by a dude in a tartan kilt, sporran, and possibly white spats and a tartan over his shoulder for good measure. Wales … harp again, triple-strung (three wires per note) because they have to be different.

Scotland actually had the harp as well, and there are a number of harp songs that come from Scotland. But who carries a harp to war? OK, besides “The Minstrel Boy” in the song (written in the 1800s, but don’t worry about that.) Harps are relatively quiet instruments compared to trumpets and bagpipes, and are fragile. At any given time, a box harp is trying to pull itself apart because of the differing tensions and twists on the neck and box. Strings and wires snap, especially wires. You pluck a gut-strung folk harp, and brush a wire strung with your finger nails, or pluck with the nails very gently. Harps love to go out of tune when the weather changes, and need to be detuned (tension released from strings) when not in use.

A clarsach. Source: https://artsphere.org/clarsach/

Bagpipes? All jokes aside, they don’t lose tune as easily as do harps. You stand to play the Scottish pipes, rather than sitting. Pipes cut through other sounds because of their harmonics and the volume one can achieve. Harps are indoor instruments most of the time. Pipes indoors … are loud. Very loud. Painfully loud. You can play bagpipes quietly, but quiet is relative.

A piper in semi-formal dress. Source: http://www.scottishpipers.net/wp/photo-gallery/

The harp in Scotland goes back thousands of years. So why do we associate Scotland with the pipes? War. Bagpipes are unusual, distinctive, and were used on the battlefield to announce who was there, to inspire confidence, and to signal in some cases. Nobles had their pipers, and pipers were protected (usually. There were rare and notable exceptions, which is why they are notable.) Harpers sang the praise of the nobles, back in the day, and entertained. Harp players do not stand beside a battlefield commander at the edge of the fighting, playing to inspire the troops. The importance of the harp got overwritten over the course of Scotland’s history, just as the harp of Wales disappeared for the most part, to be revived in the 1700s-1800s and especially the 1900s.

Tuathal is a harp player (clarsach), a wire-strung instrument. He sings songs of praise and satire, inspiring or shaming, passing on information and news, giving advice, occasionally settling disputes because he is a neutral outsider in most places, and knows the law. He is also blessed, or cursed, with awan, the power of inspiration. When that moves through him, his words have true power, even more than most bards’ songs or recitations.

Teasing Out the Tale

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I’m going back and rereading part of the Book of Invasions, the “prehistory” of the coming of civilization, then of the Irish, to Ireland. Like much of the Matter of Britain, it was not written down until well after the fact, and after Christianity had reached Ireland. This makes it an intriguing exercise if one tries to tease out what is a later “improvement” or attempt by monks to fit the story into the official, known chronology of the world (AKA, since Genesis 1:1). Some of the additions are obvious, others more subtle, and a few … Let’s say it was unlikely that the inhabitants of Ireland fled the island and went to Greece en mass, were enslaved, and then escaped by making coracles and floating back. Now, could that be a hint of memory of a group of foreign traders who camped for an extended period, or even had a trading settlement, then departed? Maybe. Or perhaps not, but an attempt to prove that the Irish were not barbarians entire.

So, how much of the legendary prehistory might be a kernel of something true? *Wags paw* Archaeology gives a few clues, including a shift in culture during the late Neolithic caused in part by weather shifts that made farming much more difficult, and impoverished the people of much of the island. Greeks might have visited Ireland, ditto Phoenicians, but not as often as they went to Britain, because Ireland didn’t have what the traders most wanted (tin). So, three waves of settlement, possibly, or two if you don’t count the possibility of earlier people who walked to the place during the Ice Age and got marooned. Cultural links developed to the mainland, and when the Celts arrived, they found people there who were different. Thus the stories of the Sidhe, the Tuatha de Danann, and the other demi-gods. The archaeology shows a difference between the later and earlier arrivals, or at least different cultural emphases. Could it have been a cultural replacement rather than population? Well, maaaybe. The latest genetic mapping suggests that only 10-15% of the Y DNA came to the island after the Neolithic (not counting Vikings and later), so cultural passage might be more accurate than “wave of conquest.” But that’s still being debated.*

Taking legends and reading back into the bits of history that might be in them has been popular since before Carl Jung. We no longer accept at face value that, oh, the Hungarians are all descended from the wandering sons of a princess and a white falcon. I suspect no one did, or at least, very few even back in the Middle Ages, which is when the story was written down. Does it serve to explain the eastern origin of the Magyars, and why they are so much more aggressive than their neighbors were? Oh yes! Likewise the Matter of Britain includes hints of what might be actual observations, like the strange tale of the wounded king of the wounded land, and how a curse settled in and people, animals, and crops all died. That might be a much-faded memory of the disaster of the 500s, when the weather went bad thanks to volcanic eruptions, and plague followed famine. The same thing appears in Viking mythology, and Scandinavian culture in general. The Fimbulwinter might have been the start of the Viking world, not the end of it.

However, good archaeologists and historians don’t twist the facts to fit the legend. No matter how satisfying it might be to “prove” ancient stories to be true. Ireland was not fought over by survivors of Noah’s Flood. Nor were the pre-Indo-European peoples of Central Europe peaceful, matriarchic, and purely egalitarian. There were probably not five clear waves of invasion of Ireland, with each population being killed off or just dying until the Tuatha De were found by the Celts. The Tuatha De probably didn’t hide out in Scandinavia for several generations, either, before returning to Ireland.

As a fiction writer looking for world-building bits? Oh, treasure trove! Granted, the book is set in something like Dal Riada, not Ireland per se, but a bard would have tales, and religions have stories, and culture has reasons. I need the history and archaeology for the foundation, yes, but after that? Whee!

*Debated being the polite term for “argued with the heat of a thousand suns.” Toss in the question of language origin for the Celtic languages and you can pop popcorn and roast entire cattle in the heat of the words.